Existentialist anthropology is strictly connected with its ontology. The traditional distinction between soul and body is completely eliminated; thus the body is a lived-through experience that is an integral part of man's existence in its relationship with the world. According to Jean Paul Sartre, "In each project of the For-itself, in each perception the body is there; it is the immediate Past in so far as it still touches on the Present which flees it." As such, however, the body is not reduced to a datum of consciousness, to subjective representation. Consciousness, according to Sartre, is constant openness toward the world, a transcendent relationship with other beings and thereby with the in-itself. Consciousness is existence itself, or, as Karl Jaspers says, it is "the manifestation of being." In order to avoid any subjectivistic equivocation, Martin Heidegger went so far as to renounce the use of the term consciousness, preferring the term Dasein, which is more appropriate for designating human reality in its totality. For the same reasons, the traditional opposition between subject and object, or between the self and the nonself, loses all sense. Dasein is always particular and individual. It is always a self; but it is also always a project of the world that includes the self, determining or conditioning its modes of being.

All of these modes of being thus arise, as Heidegger shows in his masterpiece Sein und Zeit (1927; Being and Time, 1962), from the relationship between the self and the world. Heidegger has regarded concern (in the Latin sense of the term) to be the fundamental aspect of this relationship, insofar as it is man's concern to obtain the things that are necessary for him and even to transform them with his work as well as to exchange them so as to make them more suitable to his needs.

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